Aaron C Davenport

The Defense Logistics Agency's Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO) provides excess Department of Defense property to law enforcement agencies across the United States. The authors of this report find that LESO manages an efficient program that effectively reuses excess property. But these efforts are unlikely to resolve perceptions that the program contributes to the militarization of police. This report presents three optional paths ahead.

To prepare for challenges it could face in future decades, the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) operates a strategic foresight initiative, Project Evergreen. Researchers designed an analytic game, Paratus Futurum, for the initiative in which players assess demand for USCG missions and the service's capacity to execute them in 2040 and beyond. This report documents the researchers' findings and recommendations for coming iterations of Paratus Futurum.

In this report, authors provide an assessment of the ability of government agencies and the private sector on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border to collectively respond to Great Lakes oil spill scenarios. They assess the scope of current oil spill risks in the region; the roles, capabilities, and capacities of oil-spill response partners; and any gaps and potential mitigation strategies around oil-spill response in fresh water and ice.

Researchers identified approaches the U.S. Coast Guard could take to improve crew satisfaction with precommissioning assignments on offshore patrol cutters and overall fleet readiness. They evaluated the options using five criteria: crew satisfaction, crew preparation and knowledge retention, timeliness, feasibility, and cost.

This report summarizes the findings of Evergreen V, the most recent iteration of an ongoing scenario-based strategic foresight initiative that aims to help the U.S. Coast Guard identify issues, areas of opportunity, and potential challenges that it will likely face in the coming decades, so that senior leadership can better bridge the gap between near- and long-term planning and prepare the service to meet future demands.

This report documents a research project that focused on identifying priority potential Arctic capability gaps with respect to U.S. Coast Guard operations in the region in the present and in the 2030s. It is becoming increasingly important to determine how to operate in the region, given changing conditions and the potential for increasing activity that will drive demand for more frequent U.S. government presence across a spectrum of roles.

Puerto Rico's seaborne logistics capacity is assessed in the context of the anticipated increase in imported materials used in recovery projects following Hurricane Maria. Key constraints at ports and on roads are identified. This analysis shows that the increased traffic from implementing the recovery plan can be supported with existing infrastructure using modest mitigation actions.

Because U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) rotary-wing aircraft are nearing their ends of life, the USCG is reassessing its airpower needs for its current missions and future operational requirements. Researchers assessed what airpower mixes could help the USCG execute its missions across the entire geographic domain for operations in the next 30 years. In this report, they document their findings and make recommendations.

The U.S. Coast Guard's motto is Semper Paratus--always ready. But for what? This report describes an approach to developing scenarios to aid in decisionmaking under deep uncertainty through the Evergreen strategic foresight initiative. The scenarios presented here focus on readiness, but the approach can be adapted for other contexts.

The U.S. Coast Guard needs to measure its operational-level performance effectively. To assist this effort, the authors created logic models detailing elements of the Coast Guard s 11 missions. After identifying and assessing the validity, reliability, and feasibility of relevant existing metrics, the authors go on to propose potential metrics that could improve on or complement existing metrics, as well as a framework for applying the metrics."